- Cold brakes now squeal until they warm up, unless the car has carbon brakes, which don't squeal. Note: the sim still does not model any brake performance changes with temperature at this time.

- Engine sound power now continues to get louder as rpm nears max.

- Fixed a bug in the opponent cars that would make them sound like they were driving around at full throttle even while coasting or hard braking.

Flexible Drivetrains

- All cars now have flex modeled in their drivetrain math, instead of being perfectly rigid. This gives all kinds of subtle and interesting audible and physical engine rpm wobble effects. Note: our model of the detroit locker differential that many of the oval cars use can cause some pretty rough sounding off throttle rpm bouncing as the locker and drivetrain get into a oscillation as the locker clatters between driving the left or right wheels. We're looking into that.

New Tire Model

- There have been improvements to the modeling of the tire carcass motion, which improves the handling on all the cars. All our NTM cars feel much better with this tire model update, and have had some amount (anywhere from a little to a lot) of re-tuning, so even if a car doesn't have its own release note does not mean that you shouldn't try it out to find out how it drives now!

- Tweak skid widths, smoke and skid amounts.

New Steering Model

- All the cars have better constrained steering systems to go with the tire carcass improvements, giving more precise feel.

Drafting

- Road course and oval drafting have been reworked to improve the racing experience.

Chevrolet Impala

- New rules limit track bar split left to right to a maximum of 3" at all tracks.

- Right rear underbody collision surfaces have been lowered to hit the ground after the proper amount of compression.

Chevrolet Impala Class B

- New rules limit track bar split left to right to a maximum of 3" at all tracks.

- The first pit stall has been moved back one to make it easier to exit the pits past the armco wall.

Oran Park Raceway

- Added a checkpoint so turns 7-10 can no longer be shortcut.

- North B pit lane speed reduced to 20mph to make it so that driving through the pit lane takes more time than staying out on track.

Sebring International Raceway

- New track surface shaders have been added.

Virginia International Raceway

- The last 10 pit stalls have been moved away from the pit wall to make pitting easier.

Graphics

- We have updated how we draw extra track surface details so they conform correctly to the road surface better and render more efficiently. This gets rid of our good old "floating skid marks" that we've come to know and love/hate.

- As part of the track detail improvements the race track’s surface is now always converted into a set of static meshes and stored in video memory. The old option to convert it on the fly, which had the benefit of utilizing slightly less video memory at the cost of performance, has been removed from the graphics options screen.

- Every car has had its paint adjusted to improve how paint will reflect more at low incident angles than when directly facing the viewer.

- Windshield glare at night is much reduced down to a reasonable level.

- Fixed a bug that was preventing the brake rotor glow effect from being visible.

- The sim can now reload custom car textures with the ctrl-r hotkey. This is useful if you like painting your own cars by being able to quickly load and see your work in progress paint scheme without having to reload the sim many times. When reloading is triggered, all of the existing paint jobs are immediately unloaded and will default to white. They will then begin automatically reloading one at a time. Reloading happens in the background. If the loading causes performance issues while you are driving on track you may disable from loading while you are in car via the "LoadTexturesWhenDriving" setting in the renderer.ini configuration file.

- Also, it is possible for an external application such as Trading Paints to tell the sim to reload car textures by sending irsdk_BroadcastReloadTextures using the SDK.

- Shut off the auto rotate display feature in Windows 8, and force orientation to landscape. Use app.ini [Graphics] displayRotateMode=1 to override the default screen orientation.

- Add radio channel information to telemetry, see the "RadioInfo:" section in the session string, and RadioTransmitCarIdx in the telemetry data.

- Add pit service time to telemetry. (PitRepairLeft, PitOptRepairLeft)

Race Control

- Qualifying laps will now be invalidated if any 0x or 2x car contact occurs during the lap.

- Many non-significant race control rules are no longer active once you finish your race. This could confusingly penalize people after they finished their race and cause their finishing position to drop as the post-race penalty was applied.

Hosted/Leagues/Tournaments

- The number of cars that can be used in a hosted, league or Tournament multi-car session has been changed from 3 to 4. The frame rate and performance in a session with this many cars will depend upon your pc and hardware.

- You no longer need to own all of the cars in a hosted multi-car session to participate. You now only need to own the Track where the event is being held and one of the Cars in the session. You will only be able to drive in a car that you own and you still must meet all of the other criteria of the session. You will need to download the cars you do not own. This update applies to Hosted, League and Tournament sessions

- Please Note: The "League Sessions" page and the "Hosted Racing - Join a Race" page are the only places on the site that support this functionality at this time. We are still working hard on implementing this functionality for helmet pop-ups and the "Spectator Sessions" area of the site.